Parent Driven Development

Your Hosts

Allison McMillan has hosted 22 episodes.

Allison McMillan is the Engineering Manager for Atom at GitHub. She's worn many hats including startup founder, community builder at the University of Michigan, Software Developer, and Managing Director of a national non-profit. Allison started programming at a Rail Girls workshop and is now a chapter organizer. She speaks on a variety of topics including mentorship, working remotely, and being a parent and a developer.

Speaking about and doing research on being a parent and developer is what inspired Allison to start the Parent Driven Development podcast. She has a 3-year-old son and an infant daughter. When Allison is not coding, you can find her encouraging her toddler's climbing skills, making funny faces at her daughter, or pretending she has time to bake. She lives in the Washington, DC area.

Mandy Moore has hosted 15 episodes.

Mandy is a single mom waitress turned entrepreneur. She specializes in quality audio processing and editing and provides complete show management for several podcasts including Parent Driven Development and Greater Than Code. She is also the Operations Manager for Ruby Together and Cloud City Development, a San Francisco-based Senior Full-Stack Development UX UI Design Consultancy. She lives and works remotely in the South-Central Pennsylvania area.

Women in tech, diversity and inclusion, and getting children involved in STEM education are all causes very near and dear to her heart. She lovingly refers to her 9-year-old daughter as “Chicken”.

Together, they continue to navigate the world one day at a time, and frequently travel to conferences where Mandy can be found emceeing or podcast field reporting. Meanwhile, Chicken, is taking on the tech world herself, and experimenting with being a “famous” YouTuber, ROBLOX and Minecraft Champion, and young robotics maker, while touting herself InquisitorMaster's #1 Fan.

Katherine Wu has hosted 17 episodes.

KWu is a Ruby developer at Heroku and new mom to a delightfully chubby baby boy.

She previously worked at New Relic on the newrelic_rpm gem and at Google in various technical support and product operations roles. A proud New Jersey native, she nevertheless fits in well in Portlandia, with hobbies like knitting, sewing, and making pickles from local produce.

Josh Puetz has hosted 17 episodes.

Josh Puetz is a developer with almost 20 years of experience making mistakes and telling stories about them. A veteran of several startups, he’s currently a senior software engineer at Codeship, focusing on building tools to help other developers write better code.

He lives in a small town in Wisconsin with his husband and 10-year-old daughter. When’s he not trying to figure out what to make for dinner, he enjoys photography and gaming.

Jess Szmajda has hosted 6 episodes.

Jess is a mom of one wonderful kid, the CTO at Optoro, the host of the DCTech Slack, and an organizer of the Joy of Programming Meetup. She has held lots of roles in tech; including IT support, operations, development, and eventually leadership.

When she unplugs, Jess can be found around Washington DC playing music at open mics, cooking, playing board games, and spending time with her son.

Adarsh Pandit has hosted 0 episodes.

Trained as a scientist, Adarsh left academia after finishing a doctorate to join McKinsey & Co. in New York as a Management Consultant and Strategy Fellow.

After teaching himself to code and working as a developer apprentice, Adarsh left Management Consulting and worked his way up from junior developer to Managing Director for a well-regarded boutique software development company. As SF's office lead, Adarsh focused on sales, advising, hiring, in that order.

Since 2015, Adarsh has led distributed consulting teams with clients around the world for his own company, Cylinder Digital.

Adarsh holds a Ph.D in Biophysics and Biochemistry from the University of
Chicago and a B.S. in Honors Biochemistry from the University of Michigan, none of which is directly helpful for his daily work nowadays.

Chris Arcand has hosted 0 episodes.

Chris Arcand is a senior engineer at HashiCorp where he works on Terraform, a tool for building, changing, and versioning cloud infrastructure. He organizes RubyMN, and as a public speaker has had the privilege of speaking at major conferences as close as the American Midwest and as far as Kyoto, Japan. Beyond programming he enjoys ice hockey, backpacking, and fulfilling his responsibility as a native Minnesotan to making pointless connections to Minnesota at every opportunity.

Retired Hosts

Johnny Ray Austin has hosted 2 episodes.

Johnny is an experienced engineering & technology leader. He has served as a member of the IT advisory board for the National Academy Foundation where he helped to ensure students receive the resources necessary to prepare them for industry or college. He is the former Curriculum Development Lead for the DC chapter of Black Girls Code - an organization dedicated to teaching young women of color how to program. Johnny now serves as a technology advisor for Black Girls Code. He is also an educator - having taught various courses through General Assembly.

During his time as Director of Technology at iStrategyLabs, Johnny led the development of projects and campaigns for clients such as Facebook, Kroger, Volkswagen more. As a Tech Fellow, he helped drive the engineering culture at Capital One through high impact technology contributions and thought leadership. Johnny is currently working as Head of Navigation Data at Mapbox in Washington, DC.